Artist Statement:
I am interested in the question of how things are made, believing that
attention to this question illuminates the nature of things. Made
things include art, living things, meaning and identity. I have
considered the histories of thought surrounding evolution, feminism
and modernism, three ways of thinking about making that developed
concurrently. The paintings contain various references to
these subjects via Japanese prints, scientific diagrams, domestic
décor, and most recently, the scenic background paintings from the
1964 Walt Disney musical Mary Poppins.

The paintings
refer to the silver screen of film – that realm in which we are
convinced by the illusion of colored light even as we see through it
to the blank screen behind. The work is about seeing-through, and at
the same time being persuaded by an illusion. It’s painted in thin,
flat media -- flashe, acrylic gouache, and tempera – in optically
reverberating colors on thin sheets of plywood, with the grain running
vertically to suggest atmosphere. These are un-illusionistic
materials, but the wood floats, smooth and flat, about an inch from
the wall, and the optical effects of color and texture transform the
images, rendering them supernatural in light and atmosphere, yet
convincing in their illusion of space: pictorial space, historical
space and the space between distinct yet entwined areas of human
inquiry.

The initial idea was to paint from slides that I shot from the dvd of
the movie. Mary Poppins Trees I and II and Kites
developed in this way. Then I visited urban parks and shot images
that reminded me of movie stills. Central Park Trees I and
II and Backdrop are worked from slides I took in New York’s
Central Park this past summer while experiencing a work by artist
Janet Cardiff, a filmic work titled Her Long Black Hair, which
consists of an audio-guided walk through the park. Central Park
Trees I and II come from pictures of a stand of dense
American Elms that correspond, in reality and in my paintings, to an
archetypal and literary idea of a forest. The largest work,
Backdrop, comes from an image of a space where a fountain is
surrounded by a radiating pattern of bricks. These images could have
been shot in the park regardless of Cardiff’s piece, but the premise
of her work -- which described reality as a layered thing like a
fractal, and involved following a dark-haired woman through the park –
is too connected to my enterprise of “following” Mary Poppins
to be left out of my analysis.

Mary
Poppins
was the first movie I ever saw, and it was on a silver screen. Mary
Poppins seemed just like my mother, who sat beside me – they both wore
their hair in dark buns and were magical, in an everyday sort of way.
Now I see through the illusion of a magic mother, and through the
illusion of the feminist argument. I am a feminist, but it is
problematic. Through reference to backdrops like those in Mary
Poppins, I can allude to my experience of the confluence of art
and daily life.